A Bargain Refused
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: [Legacy of the Force: Betrayal AU] Jacen looks into the future at Lumiya's prodding. This time, however, he looks at both options, rather than just rejecting one out of hand... and then chooses, and acts. Oneshot.


_They spun, they struck, the impacts of their lightsabers causing flares of light to cast the walls and floors behind them into greater darkness. On and on they fought, their loss giving them strength, until –_

_Jacen cut Luke down. _

The shock nearly blinded Jacen – nearly caused him, from the sheer pain of it, to shut his eyes to the greater view.

But he had not hung in the Embrace of Pain for naught. He ate the pain, and looked beyond.

Looked at _why_.

And, because he had endured all the agony a mortal frame could endure and come through it stronger than before, he took that blow without staggering and looked to the alternatives. He looked at what would come to pass if he struck down Nelani and spared Lumiya.

Then he chose, and acted.

"I appreciate the opportunity," he said to Lumiya, his mouth curving in a gentle and sad smile. "But – I'm afraid I am not a Sith – I am not _selfish_. I make the harder choice, because it is better for the galaxy."

He felt a flicker of surprise from her. She halted in her tracks, though Nelani attempted to pull her along. The Sith worked one cybernetic arm free, then shoved her across the room – not hard to do in low-gravity – and turned to face Jacen. "You choose not to fall?" she questioned, meeting his eyes. "Even knowing the consequences?"

Jacen licked his lips. There were only ashes in his mouth. "Knowing who will fall if I do not take his place?" he replied. "Yes. I do."

He could set the galaxy aflame himself, and leave it vulnerable to yet more conflicts in time, or be helpless to prevent its burning by another – but be present to help rebuild, to grow anew, and to regrow in such a resilient form that it would have millennia more of peace. Not eternal peace, of course. There was no such thing.

_All things die, _a man's voice that he did not know whispered in his ears. _Even stars burn out_.

"I think you would prefer to take the fall yourself," Lumiya said softly. "I think you would prefer to submit to that role, with all the hardship it would bring you, than to watch another ascend to that throne."

It was true. He shrugged. "Vergere taught me well. My preferences and hardship count for very little. What matters is my _will_, and the outcome I _choose_ to achieve." He looked into the future he had chosen, and his heart shattered once more. But the galaxy, once it had come through the crucible, would be better for it. For his children, and his children's children… "Pain means nothing."

She inclined her head. "_He will strengthen himself through sacrifice, _indeed." She turned back to Nelani, who watched the two of them with fearful eyes, like a cornered animal, and extended her hands. "No need to quiver any longer, Jedi girl. I'll go with you." She flicked one last glance back to Jacen, then looked away. "Your friend there has passed the test. I have failed."

"You're giving up?" Nelani demanded incredulously, though there was a note of relief in her voice. "You – Just like that? You Sith don't have a reputation for being _quitters._"

"Are you disappointed?" Lumiya said dryly. "You should be. If all had gone well today, you would be dead."

"I should be _disappointed_ that you didn't kill me?!"

"It wouldn't have been me, but yes," Lumiya replied. "Extremely so. You, Jacen, _and_ your little adolescent friend will, in times to come, _dearly_ wish for anything as kind and swift as death." She did not look to Jacen, but he felt her awaiting his reply.

"In the long term, this way will be better for the galaxy," he responded. "If you meant what you said, then this should be the route you would prefer, too."

He saw and felt a subtle change in her stance, from merely not looking at him to actively avoiding his eyes. Jacen paced closer, and lowered his voice until Nelani, still across the room, would be unable to hear it. "You still love him," he said, and there was no mockery in his words. Only compassion.

"No," she said, and she was a Sith; her voice was bitterer than if it had been mockery. "I know it's quite the romantic thought, but I'm not that sort of fool. I don't waste my years longing for things that are forever out of my reach."

"Not romantically," he corrected. "But you do love him. Perhaps as a friend, perhaps as an old and cherished enemy, perhaps almost as family – his father was your mentor, after all – perhaps all of those and none. Enough, anyway, that you didn't wish the future you foresaw for him, and sought out someone you could substitute in his place."

At last she looked at him, and her eyes were old and weary. "You talk too much, Jacen," she said. "Is that what Vergere liked about you? Or is that what she loathed?"

He snorted. "Vergere would lecture you about clinging to dualities."

"That sounds like the old vulture." Lumiya lapsed into silence. Had she been organic, her shoulders might have sagged. As it was, her posture remained perfect and rigid; the cybernetics that supported her frame likely kept her in flawless form unless she made an effort otherwise. "It could have been me, you know," she said at last, gazing at something far away. "I wasn't lying about those lucky breaks your aunt Mara received, and I didn't."

"Ah, but I thought everything you told me was a lie," he mused.

"It was," she said sharply. "It doesn't matter to me. I cast that aside a long time ago. I'm merely observing… a few changes here, a happy coincidence there, and another redheaded beauty would be standing at your uncle's right hand. Another woman would be play-acting at being the bad girl gone good, blissfully suppressing every truth about the world beaten into her during her youth, and living an idyllic life with her valiant and heroic husband who gave her a chance at redemption when no one else would. And another Emperor's Hand, a collection of metal and microchips wrapped around failing flesh, would have offered you the bargain you had just refused." At last, her gaze refocused, and she sighed. "I don't envy her, not any more. I think the more appropriate emotion is pity. If I did this for anyone, to be quite honest, I suppose it was for the Shira Brie who could have been – Shira Skywalker, rather. She would have cared what became of him." She looked about them, her eyes passing over Nelani as though the apprentice wasn't there. The Jedi seemed both curious about the whispered conversation and as though some instinct was telling her she didn't want to hear it. Jacen approved of her good sense, even if she needed more training in obeying such instincts. "He would have redeemed me if he could have, you know," Lumiya mused, sounding not so much a Sith as a sad old woman. Which she was, he supposed, when one stripped all the Force-sensitivity and grand galactic drama away: a sad old woman reflecting upon her wild youth in the twilight of her life. He felt like that about the joking Jacen that had been, some days, and he was not yet forty. "He couldn't, of course. So I suppose it's only appropriate that I would fail too."

Then she extended her hands again and beckoned to Nelani, and, after a moment's hesitancy, Nelani came forward to restrain her. And that was that. The conversation was over.

As they departed in search of Ben, however, Jacen looked over his shoulder. He could see the dark man who had approached him, even if no one else could have: this time, it was not one of Lumiya's specters.

The man nodded to him, the wry, wistful smile a mockery of his own. The hood of his cloak had fallen back, now: Jacen's own face stared back at him, eyes burning with jaundiced fire and features eroded by unrestrained, uncontrolled overuse of the Force.

As Jacen's face tightened, the man raised his black-and-gold saber in a brief salute, but the gesture was not all that was fleeting; already his features were changing, shifting, flowing into those of –

Jacen turned away and quickened his pace. He knew well enough the face that would replace his own. He had no need to see it.

After all, he would have ample opportunity to gaze upon it at length in the times to come.

* * *

_"He exists. He finally exists, for real."_

_ "Your phantom enemy."_

_"Yes." Luke rose._

His gaze fixed on a single point on the ceiling, he added, "It's very strange, however – I feel almost as though, now that he exists, he has _always_ existed." He reached out in the Force, trying to feel out the implications of the retrocasuality. "Perhaps – perhaps he _was_ always going to exist, but someone made such an effort to avert it that he ceased to exist. Almost. It could have gone either way." He continued to stare upwards, unblinking. "And, now that he exists, that effort was _always_ doomed to fail, and he was _always_ going to exist. It was just that nobody realized it. A tragedy, of sorts."

When he withdrew and returned fully to the world of flesh and steel, he found Mara staring up at him with an uncomprehending gaze. She had never been one for Force esoterica, preferring things that were grounded in objective reality and subject to clear laws of cause and effect. Once, he had valued that in her, since that was his life too; now that he was Grandmaster, he _needed_ that, lest he drift off into a realm of illusion and delusion and be unable to ever fully reconnect to the world of beings confined to material senses and the things they could grasp in their hands.

"I think you've had too much caf, farmboy," she said, and her gaze strayed to her own terminal; a smile lit up her features. "Message from Jacen and Ben. They're coming home."

A smile began on his own face, and then he felt it again: a flash of the man who had not existed, or perhaps had _always_ existed. He reached out again, seeking out the man's shadow in the Force –

And jolted back, startling.

"Luke? Luke." Mara had taken him by the arm, and her clear green eyes pierced into his own. "Whatever it is – whoever _he_ is – we'll find him. And we'll beat him. We always have, and we always will."

With an effort, he pulled himself away from his fixation upon whatever he had glimpsed – the shadow he could _almost _perceive, yet not quite – and forced himself to smile down at her. "You're right." He let out a chuckle, and the smile became a bit less forced. "You're good for me, you know that?"

"And don't you forget it," she said, kissing him on the cheek. "Now let's get ready for Jacen and Ben. Make ourselves presentable – can't be setting a bad example for the young, after all."

He laughed, his smile natural now, and let her lead him off by the arm, away from the terminals…

Away from what he had seen in the Force. The knowledge that _almost_ had been his, had he not recoiled in the instant's delay between his unconscious mind grasping it and his conscious mind comprehending it…

(_what's in there?_)

(_only what you take with you_)

* * *

**Author's Note: **Fate of the Jedi implies, but never confirms, a retcon/theory that Jacen became a Sith Lord because the alternative was _Luke_ falling to the Dark Side. While I can almost see it from reading Jacen's Betrayal vision with an eye towards that theory, it seems like an outright retcon because Jacen _never thinks about it once_ in his segments in Legacy of the Force; moreover, Caedus seems petty enough that he wouldn't be able to resist throwing it in Luke's face if it was the case.

For the sake of this oneshot, however, I decided to entertain the theory. That means, of course, that Lumiya's grand scheme isn't to create the Dark Man, because he would exist regardless of what she did (the 'Lumiya is arrested' branch of Jacen's Betrayal vision). What she created was a possible future where _he wasn't Luke_.


End file.
